No Mirror No More
“The objective man who no longer curses and grumbles like the pessimist, the ideal scholar, in whom the scientific instinct after thousands of total and partial failures all of a sudden comes into bloom and keeps flowering to the end, is surely one of the most valuable of implements there are, but he belongs in the hands of someone more powerful. He is only a tool, we say. He is a mirror – he is no “end in himself.” The objective man is, in fact, a mirror: accustomed to submit before everything which wishes to be known, without any delight other than that available in knowing and “mirroring back” – he waits until something comes along and then spreads himself out tenderly so that light footsteps and the spiritual essences slipping past are not lost on his surface and skin. What is still left of his “person” seems to him accidental, often a matter of chance, even more often disruptive, so much has he become a conduit and reflection for strange shapes and experiences. He reflects about “himself” with effort and is not infrequently wrong. He readily gets himself confused with others. He makes mistakes concerning his own needs, and it’s only here that he is coarse and careless. Perhaps he gets anxious about his health or about the pettiness and stifling atmosphere of wife and friend or about the lack of companions and society – indeed, he forces himself to think about his anxieties: but it’s no use! His thoughts have already wandered off to some more general example, and tomorrow he knows as little as he knew yesterday about how he might be helped.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 207
Oh but what of the subjective man, the nu-man of the latest years! Who grumbles and whines like a sordid lamb, blithering to and fro attending to its delicate wool and mutton. An ideal scholar no more, but a pitiful researcher tumbling into the destitute forever of the internet, pulling data and e-ink around in a whirlwind of self-obsessed conformity. Nothing no but agreement with the self. No bloom, no Spring, no Summer – in fact, no season at all for he to live within, only a stagnant existence of identity and the tug of each and every social whim. Nietzsche speaks of a mirror, a mirror that no longer exists as far as I can see. The reflection acts a way to see that one is not an end in himself but a labyrinth of mirrors, ducts and chambers splaying out into a willed infinity. But of course, the mirror was shattered, I know not when, only that each fragment of its death has been taken away, most likely chained the bottom of the deepest ocean – objectivity death as the mirror shatters – No more ‘mirroring back’ only continual self, identity and progress, without the reactionary reflection of he who can see he’s but a flesh, there can be no real progress, only a dainty skipping into miserable weakness. The new man does no spread himself, nor act upon himself, no. He directs himself to a supposed causal linearity towards which is his most politically dutiful desires…he thinks. Virtue, hedonism, liberation, emancipation. I spit on these terms with a smile and call them what they are, empty-headed lack of reflection from he whom knows not even the possibility of reflection.
No essence past the skin, for flesh is all, flesh for fucking and diving and frolicking and licking and sucking, flesh to be hungover, flesh for the comedown and flesh to get fat, flesh to get cut off again once the whale begins to cry. The surface of the skin has lost every trace, it’s a toxic container for socio-political determined delights, extrinsic personalities flood the sublime, and it rots and rots. Of course he who cannot reflect is left for eternity entirely whole, a unification of failures kept as successes, of idiocy maintained as truth, and of activism as a replacement for the heart. For he who never had the possibility of a mirror, and as such of reflection remains alone in an acidic humanist reverbaration, pulsing into the tug of the absolute fall. OH! He is not confused with others! Never confusing himself with no one! He knows himself and only himself, his loop, his return, his eternity is only he. And it is such a he that couldn’t change, a priori identity branding, flesh as a tag of self-righteous cawing.
Line the streets with placards high! Higher! Cast them to the sky and feel your lack pulse into ther ether! Walking through the thresher of the socius a virtue-clad cunt, destined to fall upon a cosmically pathetic handout. Oh poor boys and sons, groveling into the tear filled gutters, I beg you arise, but begging’s not my business. I’m neither sat atop a mountain, nor am I down in the abyss. I’m imminent to you all, as you are to me. Without a mirror to see, without a mirror to cast your gaze anywhere else but into a Cartesian echo. My mirror is weak, but into its bleak stains, and cob-webbed haeccity I witness you, all of you…sucking the infected ringworm out of the cosmos’ anus, allow to the defecation to tumble into your nostrils and hair, delighted in your stench. A phase-shift of patheticism emanates from your very being, all because you lack the mirror, the mirror that was never allowed for you!
Callous anxiety and pithy depression/ pilled hedons run amock/ A thousand more to the fall/ landfill humanity acts as reverb/ and the beat goes on.